"Hey, I live in a fucking menagerie," Baby Feet said as we went out onto the street. "Don't go walking off from me with your nose bent out of joint. Did I ever treat you with a lack of respect?"

I got in the truck.

"Where we going, Feet?" I said.

"Out by Spanish Lake. Look, I want you to take a message back to the man you work for. I'm not the source of any problems you got around here. The coke you got in this parish has been stepped on so many times it's baby powder. If it was coming from some people I've been associated with in New Orleans, and I'm talking about past associations, you understand, it'd go from your nose to your brain like liquid Drano."

I headed out toward the old two-lane highway that led to the little settlement of Burke and the lake where Spanish colonists had tried to establish plantations in the eighteenth century and had given Iberia Parish its name.

"I don't work narcotics, Julie, and I'm not good at passing on bullshit, either. My main concern right now is the girl we found south of town."

"Oh, yeah? What girl's that?"

"The murdered girl, Cherry LeBlanc."

"I don't guess I heard about it."

I turned and looked at him. He gazed idly out the window at the passing oak trees on the edge of town and a roadside watermelon and strawberry stand.

"You don't read the local papers?" I said.

"I been busy. You saying I talk bullshit, Dave?"

"Put it this way, Feet. If you've got something to tell the sheriff, do it yourself."

He pinched his nose, then blew air through it.

"We used to be friends, Dave. I even maybe did you a little favor once. So I'm going to line it out for you and any of the locals who want to clean the wax out of their ears. The oil business is still in the toilet and your town's flat-ass broke. Frankly, in my opinion, it deserves anything that happens to it. But me and all those people you see back on that lake-" He pointed out the window. Through a pecan orchard, silhouetted against the light winking off the water, I could see cameras mounted on booms and actors in Confederate uniforms toiling through the shallows in retreat from imaginary federal troops. "We're going to leave around ten million dollars in Lafayette and Iberia Parish. They don't like the name Balboni around here, tell them we can move the whole fucking operation over to Mississippi. See how that floats with some of those coonass jackoffs in the Chamber of Commerce."

"You're telling me you're in the movie business?"

"Coproducer with Michael Goldman. What do you think of that?"

I turned into the dirt road that led through the pecan trees to the lake.

"I'm sure everyone wishes you success, Julie."

"I'm going to make a baseball movie next. You want a part in it?" He smiled at me.

"I don't think I'd be up to it."

"Hey, Dave, don't get me wrong." He was grinning broadly now. "But my main actor sees dead people out in the mist, his punch is usually ripped by nine a.m. on weed or whites, and Mikey's got peptic ulcers and some kind of obsession with the Holocaust. Dave, I ain't shitting you, I mean this sincerely, with no offense, with your record, you could fit right in."

I stopped the truck by a small wood-frame security office. A wiry man in a khaki uniform and a bill cap, with a white scar like a chicken's foot on his throat, approached my window.

"We'll see you, Feet," I said.

"You don't want to look around?"

"Adios, partner," I said, waited for him to close the door, then turned around in the weeds and drove back through the pecan trees to the highway, the sun's reflection bouncing on my hood like a yellow balloon.

It happened my second year on the New Orleans police force, when I was a patrolman in the French Quarter and somebody called in a prowler report at an address on Dumaine. The lock on the iron gate was rusted and had been bent out of the jamb with a bar and sprung back on the hinges. Down the narrow brick walkway I could see bits of broken glass, like tiny rat's teeth, where someone had broken out the overhead light bulb. But the courtyard ahead was lighted, filled with the waving shadows of banana trees and palm fronds, and I could hear a baseball game playing on a radio or television set.

I slipped my revolver out of its holster and moved along the coolness of the bricks, through a ticking pool of water, to the entrance of the courtyard, where a second scrolled-iron gate yawned back on its hinges. I could smell the damp earth in the flower beds, spearmint growing against a stucco wall, the thick clumps of purple wisteria that hung from a tile roof.

Then I smelled him, even before I saw him, an odor that was at once like snuff, synthetic wine, rotting teeth, and stomach bile. He was a huge black man, dressed in a Donald Duck T-shirt, filthy tennis shoes, and a pair of purple slacks that were bursting on his thighs. In his left hand was a drawstring bag filled with goods from the apartment he'd just creeped. He swung the gate with all his weight into my hand, snapped something in it like a Popsicle stick breaking, and sent my revolver skidding across the flagstones.

I tried to get my baton loose, but it was his show now. He came out of his back pocket with a worn one-inch.38, the grips wrapped with black electrician's tape, and screwed the barrel into my ear. There was a dark clot of blood in his right eye, and his breath slid across the side of my face like an unwashed hand.

"Get back in the walkway, motherfucker," he whispered.

We stumbled backward into the gloom. I could hear revelers out on the street, a beer can tinkling along the cement.

"Don't be a dumb guy," I said.

"Shut up," he said. Then, almost as an angry afterthought, he drove my head into the bricks. I fell to my knees in the water, my baton twisted uselessly in my belt.

His eyes were dilated, his hair haloed with sweat, his pulse leaping in his neck. He was a cop's worst possible adversary in that situation-strung-out, frightened, and stupid enough to carry a weapon on a simple B amp; E.

"Why'd you have to come along, man? Why'd you have to do that?" he said.

His thumb curled around the spur of the pistol's hammer and I heard the cylinder rotate and the chamber lock into place.

"There're cops on both ends of the street," I said. "You won't get out of the Quarter."

"Don't say no more, man. It won't do no good. You messed everything up."

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, blew out his breath, and pointed the pistol downward at my chest.

Baby Feet had on only a bathrobe, his jockey underwear, and a pair of loafers without socks when he appeared in the brick walkway behind the black man.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing here?" he said.

The black man stepped back, the revolver drifting to his thigh.

"Mr. Julie?" he said.

"Yeah. What the fuck you doing? You creeping an apartment in my building?"

"I didn't know you was living here, Mr. Julie."

Baby Feet took the revolver out of the black man's hand and eased down the hammer.

"Walter, if I want to, I can make you piss blood for six months," he said.

"Yes, suh, I knows that."

"I'm glad you've taken that attitude. Now, you get your sorry ass out of here." He pushed the black man toward the entrance. "Go on." He kept nudging the black man along the bricks, then he kicked him hard, as fast as a snake striking, between the buttocks. "I said go on, now." He kicked him again, his small pointed shoe biting deep into the man's crotch. Tears welled up in the man's eyes as he looked back over his shoulder. "Move it, Walter, unless you want balls the size of coconuts."

The black man limped down the Dumaine. Baby Feet stood in front of the sprung gate, dumped the shells from the.38 on the sidewalk, and flung the.38 into the darkness after the black man.